Pasts and futures that keep the possible alive: Reflections on time, space, education and governing

Abstract

Over the last years, the European Commission has heavily promoted various forms of digital education. In this article, we draw upon two recent European policy documents as key articulations of Europe’s contemporary governing apparatus: Opening Up Education and the Digital Education Action Plan. The article more particularly conceives of both policy documents as offering a point of departure to analyze how this apparatus is presently seeking to enact a specific mode of existence of the contemporary learner. We argue that this educational mode of existence is being enacted by the fabrication of highly specific sorts of time and space. In order to highlight the particularity of the enacted sorts of time and space exemplified in the policy documents, we start this article with a discussion of how a traditional, modern governing apparatus aims to fabricate linear time and institutional space. The article proceeds by arguing that the present-day European governing apparatus that is concerned with digital education fabricates different sorts of times and spaces, namely potential (rather than linear) temporalities and ecological/networked (rather than institutional) spatialities. Likewise, the concrete instruments (such as platforms, portals, credits and certificates) presently adopted in order to do so largely differ from modern instruments. Conclusively, we argue that the presence of these newly emerging (often digital) instruments, and the times and spaces that are fabricated through these instruments, call for an opportunistic mode of existing as a contemporary learner.

Keywords:

• Europe
• time
• space
• digital education
• governing instrumentation
• mode of existence

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their very helpful and constructive comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For more attempts of examinations along these lines: Simons, 2014b, c; Simons, 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathias Decuypere

Mathias Decuypere is an Assistant Professor at the Methodology of Educational Sciences Research Group (KU Leuven, Belgium). Primary research interests are in developing and making use of qualitative research methods through a sociomaterial and sociotopological lens; new educational technologies and heavily digitized educational environments; higher and regular education policy; open education; and education for sustainable development.

Maarten Simons

Maarten Simons is Professor of educational policy and theory at the Laboratory for Education and Society of KU Leuven (Belgium). His principal interests are in educational policy, new mechanisms of power, and new global and European regimes of governing education and lifelong learning. Moreover, in his research he focuses explicitly on the challenges posed to education with a major interest in (re)thinking the public role of schools and universities, and the particular public and pedagogical role of teachers and academics.